Yo-Yo Wiki News/Two years of YoYo Wiki
The home page of the yo-yo wiki was created on the 27th sep 2005, and yo-yo information sites have never been the same since. As we've now had our two year anniversary, I thought I'd have a look at how far the yo-yo wiki has come, following up on Josh's article at our first anniversary. Our first article was American Nationals, followed quickly by articles on Bird In Hand, ExtremeSpin and yo-yo forums. Each one of these articles has been gradually expanded, corrected and improved. Wikis work very well at producing quality articles over time. Contributions We get a great variety of contributions from all sorts of people. Some people contribute a little, some contribute large amounts of time and effort. Putting effort into the yo-yo wiki makes sense because editors in the future can update your contributions, meaning your work never goes to waste the way an old forum post can. Strengths and weaknesses We have over 1,000 articles and have had over 500,000 hits, making us probably the biggest yo-yo information site on the web. That's something the yo-yo community can be proud of. Our articles on styles of play and bearing cleaning are probably the best around (although there are many other good ones), and there is nowhere else that has a comprehensive list of worldwide yo-yo stores. That's something you don't get at store sponsored sites. However, whilst we have many great articles, there are many that still need work. We have many articles with very little content or little useful content. People only work on what interests them, so whilst we have 355 articles on yo-yo models we only have 37 articles on tricks. We're always looking for new contributors and there is plenty of places for people to contribute. We even have a 'sandbox' for users who just want to experiment without mucking up a page. We also seem to have a number of editors who only like writing yo-yoer biographies. Unfortunately they're only autobiographies. This puts experienced editors in a spot where we don't want to discourage new editors, but we don't really want an article on every person who has ever thrown a sleeper written by that person. If you want to read up on this our people guidelines state a list of criteria for being a notable yo-yoer. The general rule of thumb is if a yo-yoer is sufficiently well known, someone else will create an article about them. Hosts We've been through a number of hosts, and every problem has caused downtime. Our worst was going down for 4 weeks, due to server software issues and not having anyone on board who was experienced enough to fix it. Hopefully these issues should now be a thing of the past as we're hosted by Wikia, a business that provides hosting to wikis. It does mean we have a few adverts, but the Wikia staff have the expertise we need and we now have someone we can contact if things go wrong. If the admins (me and Josh) don't need to worry about the server side things, we can focus on writing great articles with the other editors. Legal issues If being successful means people start sending you legal threats, then the yo-yo wiki has been very successful in its second year. We received cease and desist letters from both The Ned Show and Duncan. We've survived, and whilst it was stressfull at the time the yo-yo wiki admins have learnt how to respond to these things and it shouldn't be a problem if we get other nasty letters in the future. These issues are documented here and here. The future So, where to from here? I had predicted that there would reach a point where the number of articles on the site would stabilise, but it hasn't happened yet. Users have found new things to create articles for, and so the wiki grows. As we continue into our third year, do come back regularly to see what has changed, and maybe try editing yourself. We'd love to have you join us. --Wilfred 23:30, 31 October 2007 (UTC)